Marine Le Pen, former chair of the French Right-populist Rassemblement National and the leading opposition politician in France, has been convicted by a Paris court of embezzling public funds. She has received a four-year prison sentence, two of which are suspended and two of which are to be served under house arrest with an ankle monitor. Le Pen will also have to pay a fine of €100,000, and she has been deprived of the right to run for political office for five years. Le Pen is leading the polls in the race to succeed Emanuel Macron in the coming 2027 presidential election, with the support of over one-third of the French electorate. With this sentence, the Paris criminal court hopes to remove the leading candidate from the race entirely. Le Pen can of course appeal, but her prospects are uncertain and a favourable ruling may be years away.
Le Pen was convicted alongside eight other members of the Rassemblement National/Front National and 12 parliamentary aides. She did not personally embezzle funds or enrich herself from EU coffers. Rather, prosecutors accuse her of directing aides to undertake work for her party while they were receiving salaries from the European Parliament. They claim this happened between 2004 and 2016, and that Le Pen and her associates misappropriated over €4 million in this way. While nobody doubts the substance of the accusations, what Le Pen did was far from unusual and the sentence just seems ridiculous to me. Many European parliamentary representatives have used staff paid from parliamentary budgets for party projects – including Franziska Brantner, the present Co-Chair of German Green Party. Until recently this was a common practice, and even now the distinction between party and parliamentary work is not always easy to maintain, and both routinely and deliberately blurred.
Le Pen is a complex political figure, and she has not always been an unvarnished force for good. Her campaign to normalise the Rassemblement National (known as ‘dédiabolisation‘, or ‘de-demonisation’) came at devastating cost to Alternative für Deutschland during last year’s European elections. In service of casting the Rassemblement National as something less than ‘far Right’, Le Pen and her party attacked the AfD for its rhetoric surrounding ‘remigration’ and even seized upon Maximilian Krah’s inept remarks about the Waffen-SS to kick the entire AfD delegation out of the Identity and Democracy faction of the European Parliament.
In the wake of these fireworks, some German commentators have suggested that the AfD undertake a de-demonisation campaign of its own, for example by distancing itself from nationalist AfD politicians like Björn Höcke. Le Pen’s fate shows that programmes of optical moderation and attempts to claim the political centre provide no salvation. The European political establishment only claims to be worried about ‘the extreme Right’; its true anxieties attach to its hold on power and nothing else.
Le Pen’s sentence confirms an ominous anti-democratic tactic emerging across Europe, namely attacks on the passive suffrage of opposition politicians. At the start of this month, the Central Election Bureau of Romania withdrew Călin Georgescu’s right to run for office there, months after Georgescu emerged as the frontrunner in the first round of the Presidential elections and the Romanian Constitutional Court annulled the vote. In Germany, schemes to attack passive suffrage have also been gaining ground, with the CDU and SPD openly planning to use this measure against anyone convicted more than once of the broad and ill-defined speech offence of ‘incitement’.
This is very bad, and I fear it is a symptom of something much worse.
Europe is entering a new political era and its rulership class is rapidly aligning itself around a new great cause. Why Europe even needs to have great causes is a powerful question, but since 1945 we cannot get away from them. The Cold War was a very long and a very great cause indeed. When that evaporated, we moved on to the next great cause, which was climatism. This achieved a dubious peak during Donald Trump’s first term and drew momentum from a performative moral one-upmanship directed against his administration. Now we are at the start of Trump’s second term, climatism is collapsing even more rapidly than I expected, and European politicians are taking up the fight against “the Right” instead. Climatism was yesterday, antifascism is today.
You will notice that each of these great causes is directed against an enemy. In the Cold War we hoped to defeat communism and the Warsaw Pact. Afterwards, our elites were free as never before to incorporate Leftist themes (the communist threat having vanished), and so they took up arms against standard socialist villains like the energetically loathed if relentlessly under-realised ‘capitalists’, who destroy the world with unchecked industrial production and who must be brought to heel by the regulatory state. I very much fear that the new villains of the antifascist programme are simply the people, who are destroying ‘democracy’ with their unchecked personal aspirations, prejudices and wayward beliefs. They will try to bring us to heel too, via what tactics we can only imagine.
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The Far Centre strikes again. Banning democracy to save democracy is probably a bad idea.
I note that most comments in the Times are supportive of this anti-democracy. A sad group of sheep.
The mentally ill far fascist of the far left of the ‘centre’……the true fascists. They tried to kill the Tronald, debanked Farage, have basically outlawed AFD, Le Pen now going to prison, Romania, Moldova etc. I see a pattern but I am too stupid to understand it….
And never forget, Hitler was a socialist not far right!
Hitler was originally a dedicate monarchist who joined a far right party (the German Workers Party) with the intent of a nationalist restoration of Germany to its former glory after the communist revolution in Germany had eliminated the monarchies and led to a socialist-controlled republic by the grace (not much of a grace) of its most dedicated enemies. He was appointed chancellor by the monarchist Generalfeldmarschall v. Hindenburg when he was president of the Weimar Republic and his initial cabinet was a coalition cabinet of the NSDAP and the monarchists from the DNVP. Hitler’s political goals where to get rid of the republic and replace it with a political system based on a pseudo-military hierarchy with him on top as the “leader of the German people” fate had sent them. He also believed that German nationalism was facing an existential struggle with Marxism/ Bolshevism which lead to the ultimately ill-fated German invasion of the USSR, a professional blunder of the German general staff which should never have happened¹.
The political agenda of the NSDAP doesn’t constantly jump from right to left and back right and then, back to the left, based on the political position of the ‘democrat’ who presently wants to make a political ‘argument’.
This history of socalism is document in Wikipedia and Hitler’s reason for adopting the term in Mein Kampf. Both are available for free on the internet, an excuse for these ignorant assertion thus simply doesn’t exist.
¹ As Erich v. Falkenhayn already aptly observed: A Russian army aggressively employing the near limitless room for strategical retreats available to it could never really be beaten.
Thankyou, as I said not far right
June Slater posted on Twitter something about Hitler surviving the war and going to live in Argentina, asking if anyone knew if the report was right. Someone answering her said it was correct, that he’d retrained as a tool maker and had secretly moved to the UK under an assumed name. Sturmer, Stirmer, Stermer … something like that anyway.
Climatism was yesterday, antifascism is today.
Except, of course, that fascism was and is leftwing. Mussolini was a Marxist who adapted Marxism to the situation where the Italian working class was both underdeveloped and non-revolutionary, but where the middle-class radicals still wanted their revolution. Mussolini’s gift to the middle-class Left was the social revolution the working class couldn’t give the middle-class Left.
The nonsense that fascism is right-wing – to right of, and derived from, conservatism – is the lie invented by the Bolshevik Comintern in the early 1920s, and, since the War, adopted by the whole Western Left. This lie dovetails with the contemporary Left’s visceral hatred of, and demonisation of, the working class – especially the working class’s in-group preference which expresses itself as patriotism.
“Anti-fascism” today is simply hatred of white people and European civilisation.
It’s gaslighting plain and simple.
The techno totalitarians in power in Europe call their opponents fascists, but are by almost every definition of fascism, fascist themselves.
They consider the state to be above everything else and that everyone should be subservient to the state and it’s institutions. They demand obedience. They have a very strong sense of nation, except that their nation is Europe.they carry themselves as if Europe was some sort of motally superior entity, whose values everyone else should adopt. Except when engaging with entities as powerful as themselves, I.e. China, in which case they accept and admire their strength and power and defer to them.
They’re Euro fascists.
I recall the following quotation from a couple of years ago but can`t remember from whom: “We are in a magical world right now where everything is fascism except worshiping state authority and merging state and corporate power.”
Getting truer to sinister form by the day, from the heirs to the Club of Rome…
“…Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely.”
Club of Rome, Limits of Growth (1972)
They were always going to find her guilty whether she did it or not.
The European elites hate populists and will do everything they can to stop citizens voting for them and electing them.
She was more electable now than at any other time and the “elites” were scared their gerrymandering wouldn’t work next time so they came up with another solution.
Just like they did in the Romanian Presidential elections and in Germany to keep the AfD out.
There was only one place the unelected, constantly unaudited, infinitely unaccountable EU was ever going to end up. Defending its own grubby survival by all means necessary. Hitler was the leader of the National Socialists, ‘socialism’ being the buzzword of most EU supporters and their politicians. The EU are the Nu-Far Right.
An ankle monitor? That is crazy. What is the point of an ankle monitor? Unbelievable. This is a woman who is known far and wide. Its not like she is going to escape to Uruguay.
And she probably needs 24/7 security from the religion of peace.
>What is the point of an ankle monitor?<
Humiliation?
Ball & chain is so yesterday.
We will have to see whom she endorses as a candidate in the next French Presidential Election and who emerges as a leader of the party